Another person’s perceptual experience may not be the same as ours.
This is Fundamental to understanding the experience of #autistic folks. I always assumed everyone perceived the way I do & I’m just a sook who can’t cope. This is not true! I am sooo glad my partner now understands this.
Same applies to information processing & seeing patterns. I thought everyone can see what I do. They don’t. We’re ok.
It’s bleeding obvious once it’s put this way, innit. I struggled all my life to understand my differences w sensory &information processing, thinking of each bit as a different issue & me as sooky &broken. Framing as neurodivergence over the past 15yr (since my early 50s) has been a revelation. Reframing is slow work & there’s a lot to grieve for, but through it all the company of nd peers is THE BEST THING.
596 years ago today, Hanseatic cities of Northern Germany retained the services of the privateer captain Bartholomeus Voet, his nine ships and 300 men. With dire consequences for my hometown, Bergen - but also to great annoyance for themselves.
A thread:
The Hansa and the Nordic countries were the best of frenemies at this time. The Hansa traded extensively with the Nordics and often waged war as well, typically allying with one Nordic country against another...
I'm putting together my Christmas list for family. It's that time of year again. So... Send me some reading recommendations! Give me links to YOUR books, guys. I'm going to bookmark this and save it for later, so I can purchase stuff throughout the year as well. I want to support everyone.
I hope everyone will check out the comments, too. Let's all support and love one another and help each other when and where we can.
@floofpaldi Love seeing everyone promoting their work! 😊❤️ Hope the family finds a new favorite among them!
My book isn't out (yet), I just have some short stories and research articles available on my BuyMeACoffee. If you do this again next year, I'll throw my work in then. I will recommend "The Starless Sea" by Erin Morgenstern. Haven't finished it yet but what I have read I've enjoyed.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-1.jpgThe last few weeks I have been unduly fascinated by Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, a 2019 game that was supposed to make the whole of human evolution playable in a breathtaking journey.
You might think that’s promising a bit much, and it is. The game released to rather critical reviews and never made the impact it was supposed to.
And I see why. The game is intentionally impenetrable. It seems in the beginning it didn’t even have the visual cues for the actions I came to rely on, and even with those barely anything is explained. The tutorial is brief and drops you directly into an intensely dangerous world, and the game delights in telling you it won’t give you further hints.
You start as a tribe of hominids about 10 million years ago (the missing link) and have to make your way to about 2.5 million years ago.
In between you have to steer your hominids, start figuring out the world (horsetail good, mushrooms uuugh but filling), invent the first tools like “stick” and “mud” (a truly versatile tool!), and, well, die a lot.
Everything seems made to kill you. Go too high up the tree and an eagle gets you, go through grass a python gets you, walk through water a crocodile eats you. And then there’s the stalker cat which often comes unannounced and pounces you. And unlike the others the cats will stalk you until they can kill you. I had one follow me from one side of one biome to the other.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-2.jpgIn between you carry kids with you, because it’s not important what you do with your current character, unless kids see you do it and learn from it. If you do enough of a particular action neural energy will grow and new neurons will activate. In the end its a skill tree system, even if developing it needs generations, or hundreds of thousands of years and a single character will never survive it. From one generation to the next a limited amount of newly learned skills can be kept, but what you really need to get is mutations. These come randomly with new kids, but they won’t become apparent until you do an evolutionary leap. But you need them because some skills are gated by them, and you won’t be able to progress unless you have them.
It’s all very complicated and worse, barely explained.
Unlike many other games this game has nearly no fantastic elements at all. Everything is based on scientific research, there is no story at all, outside of the story of how humans start becoming bipedal and omnivorous… and start killing everything else I guess. The only element I would term fantastical are the meteors.
Danger, here be spoilers: Every once in a while you discover a new landmark and it triggers a cut scene where meteors rain down on the landscape. These will smoke for a while (multiple generations and even generational leaps), but in the end they stop. If your hominid finds them they will gain further unity with the universe, and they will get a free skill, and all kids present get a mutation. It becomes a convenient shortcut to organize an expedition to a meteor site with as many kids as possible to lock down as many mutations as possible over one or two generations. Of course it turns out all these meteor sites have some rather dangerous wildlife nearby, or are in rather inconvenient sites.
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/ancestors-3.jpgEven the actual goal of the game is barely communicated: you have to reach the last evolutionary step in the game, reaching the genus homo ergaster, and then the closing animation plays. I guess it was planned that the next part of the series show the further development, alas I don’t think the game was successful enough. It is rather niche, and the only reason I even got it was because it was part of my Humble subscription at one point. Still. It is an interesting game, and one that I spent a lot of time on. It gives you an appreciation of how far we’ve come, and how dangerous cats used to be. Or still are.
"the www is fundamentally a distributed hypermedia application."
— taylor, medividovic, dashofy. 2010.
"[i]t is far easier to standardize representation formats and relation type names (i.e., naming controls) than it is to standardize objects and object-specific interfaces."
— roy fielding. 2008.
"..our universities in Australia must be places where we have the courage to take up our responsibilities as ethical researchers and teachers: our classrooms must be spaces of historical truth-telling that seek to explain why and how this is happening and support students to express their truths, including through student activism."
"As educators and researchers, we pay our deep respect to Palestinian scholars, writers, artists, and activists, including Palestinians based in Australia. We commit to continuing to learn from long histories of Palestinian description, critique, and analysis. Our colleagues in Palestine have called on us again and again to take action, and so we must. Telling the truth in history – as we know from our experiences in this settler-colony of Australia – is an important act of resistance, and we commit to undertaking this task."
“As historians who study – amongst other things – settler-colonialism, genocide, apartheid, gendered and sexed violence, Jewish history, Palestinian history, Israeli history, and more, we say that this breathtaking and heartbreaking violence is unacceptable and must be opposed entirely. We know that the violence did not begin on October 7th, and is a result of long transnational histories of imperialism, colonialism, state violence, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism. The story does not begin on October 7th, and longer histories – involving European colonisation of Palestine, the mandate system and British rule, the 75 years since the establishment of the State of Israel, the 56 year occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and the 16 year blockade on Gaza – must be held at the forefront of our minds. “
#RomanceReviews 4: I'm going with a palate cleanser of an actual #romance this time: Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert. I listened to the previous book in the series and it was sweet, hilarious, and British (they chose the narrator well).
I'm expecting this to be a straight, interracial romance with at least one neurodivergent character.
Re: not going down too fast: "And if you did it too quickly, you wound up with a woman who was more interested in what you could do with your tongue than your sudoku skills."
Alright, here is my #RomanceReviews roundup for Act Your Age, Eve Brown. Loved it.
As expected going in, it was sweet, hilarious, interracial and British. So British. The banter had me cackling repeatedly as I tried to do housekeeping. This was a little bit of an enemies-to-lovers plotline.
Both (straight) neurodivergents were really truly into each other. This was what I think of as a true romance, with deep emotional and sexual attraction.
Him: “Is it terrible that I’m going to fuck you on this desk?”
Also him: “He wanted inside her confetti-strewn head every chance he got. It was the only foreign country he could remember wanting to visit.”
*swoon
I love that Talia Hibbert writes neurodivergent people and fat people as genuinely desirable and competent.
Good consent, 5 stars, would totally fuck this guy.
Slight delays with Chapters 3 and 4. They'll both air Friday, December 15th and December 29th, respectively. Then we resume our usual schedule to round out January.
You can read Chapters 1 and 2 NOW on via the link below.